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Pablos Holman

lines on the record: 174
first: 2025-09-16
most recent: 2025-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So first of all, lots of hackers that are way smarter than me and way more potent. So nothing to worry about. I think that what”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People cast me that way, and I think it's probably fair. But what I wrote in the book about that is that I think I'm not a Pollyannish optimist. Like I don't think everything's going to be awesome. What I think is the future could be awesome, that we have some volition in this, that we build that future ourselves with the toolkit we have. That toolkit is largely the technologies we have. And so I think it's up to us to try. It's up to us to decide where we want to go, what we want to aim for, what future we want to build, and do that. So I call it possibilist. So I think a future that's awesome is absolutely possible. A shady future is also possible. But the balance is up to us. And so that's how I would describe that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I've been wearing the same ones for 20 years. You can't break them. Oh, I have a few pairs that I cycle out because. The nose bridge gets loose, and I got a guy who will tighten him up. But two pairs would have lasted this long. I have more just in case I live a couple extra lifetimes. I've been stockpiling them.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oakley made them in their heyday. So back before Oakley got sold out, they had these designers who were like, you know, little gods that could do whatever they wanted. And they built this factory in like Nevada to make titanium frames. But this is intensive to do. 425,000 watts to make one pair of frame. And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process. And so eventually the factory blew up. And nobody will ever make glasses this way again.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I've been wearing the same glasses for like 20 years, which is kind of why they ended up on the cover of the book and people associate me with the glasses. These are the best glasses ever made, which is why I started wearing them. And because I'm in labs all the time, I kind of need safety glasses that wrap around. Are they prescriptive?”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not trying to fly below the radar at this point. I got that username on a mainframe when I was like 12, and I don't even remember how. So I've been called Pablos for.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be great, but we'll start out with tiny ships that move a few containers to islands. I mean, there's all these islands that you can't even get a ship to. We could just do that. Sell your happy meal toys to Thailand.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only 14 of those days are on the water. The rest of the time they're just hanging out at port waiting to get load or unload. So that 14 days is a little slower when you're sailing 30% slower. But overall, it's faster. But we can make smaller ships and lots of them.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The regulatory risk in different industries, in shipping, you're dealing with teamsters in ports. I mean, that's where labor unions come from. Read about the wobblies having shootouts with the sheriff's office. I mean, this is crazy stuff in the history of labor. So, you know, you got to be careful about who you put out of a job. But I think it's one of these exciting things. What you mentioned is the reason ships are so big is because you get a drag advantage. You get improved drag when you double the size of a ship, your drag only goes up by 50%. So your incentivized to build a biggest ship you can. Well, those ships are clogging up ports. So if you look at what's happening in shipping, your happy meal toys start out in China. It takes 50 days to get them to Los Angeles.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you for a favor. Yeah. Might need one myself. So after this, so the point is you could identify, you know, I don't know, risk of assassination as a fourth kind of risk. But look, we have to build these things.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Risk of assassination is high. I grant that, maybe higher than even in taxis because there are a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry. You might need to partner with one of them. But that's a tomorrow problem. The truth is we can do this.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any shipping company in the world could make this ship, none of them will. So that's what we have to do. That's what the tech industry needs to do. That's why Deep Tech matters. That's why I want your fans who are listening once they graduate from software, come help us build this ship, you know, help us take on, you don't need to be a physicist. I got physicists. What I need is entrepreneurs who want to build these industries. And when you look at what happened with Uber, that playbook is incredible. What happens the day my first ship sales? Do we sell this to Maersk? That would be like Uber selling Tellow Cab. No, we build the next Maersk. That's the opportunity. Would you have rather built Uber or Maresk? So that's where...”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So they're not everywhere because we've all learned about disruption. You've seen what happened. Any taxi company in the world could have made an iPhone app. None of them did”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no wind. We have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. But we're actually really good at weather prediction because even cargo ships now need to avoid storms. And so the weather prediction has improved so much. We're really good at that. But yeah, your worst case scenario is you got a ship full of bananas and they're stuck in a dead zone. So we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. And then they sail themselves.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so The other important advancement is its sailing. So it doesn't need a crew, but it doesn't need fuel. Those $2 trillion spent in the shipping industry every year are spent five out of six of those dollars is burned”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. Well, so just to make it clear for the audience, we have a team that's cargo ships that are autonomous. So I don't think it's that hard. You duct tape a Tesla to the front and it can drive across an ocean. Probably anybody listening would believe that's possible. There's nothing to hit out there. One documented pedestrian ever.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Durable goods, all your sinks and bicycles and light fixtures and chairs, that's four trillion dollars a year. Automotive is another four, five, six trillion. I mean, we're just talking about massive industries bigger than the entire tech industry, and we've completely ignored them in Silicon Valley. That's what DeepTech is. That's what we're going after.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fact check me, guys. 98, if you fact check me, I'm going to win. Okay, 98%. Of what's left is that's energy, but it's shipping. Shipping is a two trillion dollar industry, as big as software. We could talk about that. Durable goods.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The size of the markets, if you're one of these SaaS investors and you see a TAM of $10 billion, let's say, for a Zoom or a Slack or something, that sounds good. If you add up all the software companies in the world, including Microsoft, Emeta, and everybody combined, their combined revenue is about $2 trillion a year. The global GDP is over $100 trillion a year. Though Silicon Valley is doing 2% of what humans rely on. That other 98% is my TAM.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's really not technical risk that much these days. If you can draw it on Canva, then we can make it. Okay. I'm doing is the opposite. I take a lot of technical risk. Can we build this nuclear reactor or can we put solar panels in space? Can we do whatever? But the day that I get through that, the day we get through that, the day the first reactor goes in the ground and lights up, there's no more technical risk. It works. You can see it. And there was never any market risk because I just have vast industrial markets, trillion dollar markets. And that's very important to understand. Our companies on average will graduate from venture earlier. We're not selling equity to make more nuclear reactors. There's project financing and debt for that. So I think investors are missing what's possible in DeepTech. Basically, no market risk once we get through the technical risk. And so”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have milestones like MVP product market fit, those kinds of things, because that's a way to reduce market risk. Technical risk, you never heard of it. If I can draw an iPhone app on a napkin”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't need to. We have a small percentage of things we back that are exclusively software, but by and large, they don't need our help. They probably don't need your help because those are easier things that other people are going to do anyway. I do things like, say, new algorithms in AI, but I wouldn't do applied AI. Things like that. So things that move the need along what's possible, new chip architecture as I do. But anyway, the point is. Let's get back to hardware in a minute. You're investing, you're looking at risk, as you described. So all of Silicon Valley could say is fixated on market risk”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's okay. That's cool to make software, and it's a good, I think, good practice run. If you're an entrepreneur and you made an app, cool. Practice. Now take on a new technology that's a 10x multiplier in some 100-year-old industry where nobody in Silicon Valley has touched it. To me, that's where the action is. I think I can prove that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To invest in them and help get them out of the lab or out of the garage and into a startup. So that's what I'm looking for in the world. Now, that's a much different thing than what we're both very familiar with startups and venture capital and probably audiences. To the last couple decades of Silicon Valley, let's say, have evolved a very impressive machinery for funding iPhone apps to have Wii delivered to your dorm room by a drone. They're not going to take on nuclear reactors. You can't take a nuclear reactor and go knock it on doors in Silicon Valley and expect to get a response. Maybe this week it's getting better. But the point is, we've been funding these SAS holes for decades. Instead of Actual technologies.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could get into Yeah. Okay. So there's a few things there. I usually get involved when I see a technology that I think is 10 times better than state of the art. If you go to like Hewlett-Packard, there's somebody there, there's an engineer that's super smart figuring out how to make inkjet printers like 1% better, which is awesome. But I want the guy who's figuring out how to make whatever comes out of inkjet. Two times better There's probably not enough margin there to ensure that you can go the distance. But 10 times better, that's a real window. You know, it's 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times more efficient, 10 times on any metric could be a good window. So that's kind of where I see deep tech breakthroughs as becoming sort of contenders, then we try to.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go to Copenhagen and one neighborhood The energy equation, I guess. But I don't know how you think. Well, so again, something like plastics are part of the reason we all exist. Like they are very, very useful for saving lives in a lot of ways. But yeah, you want to use the plastic where it belongs. Not where it doesn't belong. Yeah. So, yeah, keep it out of your testicles and keep it out of the ocean and keep it out of the places where you don't want it. But there are places where it can be very, very helpful.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“400 parts per million means 400 needles in a haystack with a million pieces of straw. That's what we're talking about. So good luck. I think you want to find a less entropic source of carbon, like leave the coal on the ground if that's what you want to do. It's very highly concentrated there. If you had energy that was cheap and basically free, yeah, then you could go pump all the air through a filter and go get those carbon molecules. But we're really not being honest about the basic arithmetic for a lot of these things. And so I can be a little harsh on these ideas, but it's not because I don't want them to work. It's just that I want them to be done in a logical order.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scaling the wrong thing. We got to pick something that's going to work and then go build that. And you can just do basic arithmetic to get those answers a lot of the time. So solve energy first. If you want to go do carbon capture, pick CO2 molecules.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great example to me was how Like recycling played out in the US. We've been recycling our whole lives. Right now, it's kind of a wash. You'd probably burn less gas making fresh plastic than if you try to recycle these plastic bottles and things. And we're 50 years into that. And so it's just putting the cart before the horse, recycling is going to work great once you have a nuclear reactor to power your recycling plant. But we're not there. We're burning gas to do it. And you watch out your window when the truck comes. It's going to pick up the trash and the recycling and throw them in the same truck. It's not working. We're not being honest about that. And it placates people. They feel like they did their part separating stuff out. So I think it's one of the things I'm trying to convey to people with technologies is you can't keep putting the cart before the horse. We don't have time to keep”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, say the number one thing is going to be energy. Energy, the number one thing is fission reactors. Love fusion. Hope we get it someday. Don't hold your breath. We have other technologies that I think could happen sooner than fusion that we could talk about, like space, solar. But I would say aggressively deploy nuclear reactors, make that as easy as possible. I mean, the biggest problem remaining is the litigious nature of the US. So you start a nuclear reactor project, you get a thousand lawsuits. We've got to squelch that because we're competing with China and China doesn't have that problem. And so make a clean regulatory track that makes it possible to deploy these things at scale. So that's the most important thing. If you get nuclear reactors, you solve a lot of other problems for free. And so I think that with limited attention span, that would be where my focus would be. Commercially, we can take care of the chips and everything after that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just because the US has never figured out how to approve any advanced reactor technology. We could build something like that. That reactor is powered by nuclear waste. It literally recycles nuclear waste inside the reactor. So that's where we want to go. That might take a while. So the deep fission reactor that I described that goes in the borehole, no new technology, just a simple design. And you get the containment for the price of a hole. And we have a whole industry that's real good at holes.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Involves a bunch of advanced reactor technologies, so like the Terra Power Reactor that we invented at the Intellectual Ventures Lab, which we can't build because it's new technology, not because there's any other reason.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there are different kinds of reactor technologies, and I won't weigh in on that because I think we need a thousand silver bullets and I kind of want them all to succeed. Obviously, I invest in the ones I think are the best. But the future of reactors”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they have about 130 reactor projects, and they tend to get them done on time, on budget. There's different technologies. They're trying them all. It takes them about three years to build the reactor. And those are big ones. They're smoking it. It's amazing.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They will deploy their first reactors in July. It's insane, it's awesome, and then we'll make thousands in a gigafactory.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty reliable so far. So then that makes Steam that goes back up and you run a turbine in a regenerator like everyone else. So the reason I'm describing this is that That company was on a track to get the reactor approved in a couple years, build a test corps at a national lab over a couple years, then build a commercial reactor in like 2029. The Department of Energy is pushing them to do all of that by July.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stole the whole of dirt. Yeah. Leave the uranium where we found it. Like, it's a really exciting way of making new coolers. There's a water in the borehole that goes down and cools it. What's so fascinating is if you look at like a Fukushima type problem, there's these pumps that are supposed to be pumping water through the reactor core to cool it. And those pumps could fail. Well, the water pressure in the borehole from gravity creates enough pressure to cool the reactor.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regulated them into oblivion. That is all changed now. And as of this year, this is crazy. As of this week, so we have now a nuclear reactor company, I should describe, which has invented a reactor that fits in a borehole. They bury it a mile deep. So this reactor is unquestionably safe. It's the size of a Toyota, not more complicated than a Toyota. And the thing can be made in a factory like a Toyota. But it's buried under 10 billion tons of rock. It's something that if anything went wrong, there'd be no radioactivity at the surface. It's a mile from anyone's backyard.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah. I mean, I would say the oil industry probably staffed Congress for most of our lives. Now it's hyperscalers. And so we are getting the legislation that we need. You know, last year, the most bipartisan bill I know of was called Advance. That was to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. Now Trump has signed multiple executive orders to build nuclear reactors and free it up. And it's working. The overhaul of the NRC, which regulates nuclear, has been amazing. They're supportive and helpful. In my lifetime, they were usually an anti-nuclear activist group. We invented one of the most advanced nuclear reactors at the Intellectual Ventures Lab where I was before. And for the last 18 years, you've seen me on stage telling people nuclear reactors are awesome and they're coming and they weren't coming. And that is because the NRC”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meta and Microsoft and Google. And the reason is that we don't make enough energy on this planet. Now, you could say we make enough energy for Americans because we're not very price sensitive and we can just keep throwing money at it. But you will watch even not counting AI, you will see that energy demand is off the charts. Like try to remember when Shell or Chevron advertised to get you to buy more gas. Like it's the biggest market in the world. They don't have to advertise their product. I mean, they advertised to get you to buy it from them instead of doing it.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These days, those are the biggest ones. And the reason they're so big is they're generally applicable. Computers can be applied to everything. They'll end up, if you haven't got one in your pocket buying it now, you will. I mean, it's just, they go everywhere. So computers are very important. Technology that's generally applicable. So it has to, you just can't ignore it. So you could hang out in Copenhagen and draft off China and the U.S. if that's what you want to do. I think it's dangerous not to play the game. So you want to get to the point where you can at least wield these technologies to whatever extent you think is important. So that's as much as I think people really need to know. Now, there's a whole stack. Software relies on the chips, which increasingly on energy. All these hyperscalers have woken up this year to the fact that a chip from NVIDIA needs a shit ton of energy. And we've been burning gas to get it.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a promising start. You know, here's how I would try to think about it technology in general, especially computers, especially computer security, these things are a war of escalation. You cannot win that war. You can lose very easily by not playing. And so for better or worse, I think it's important to think about these things this way. You can kind of see it if you're going to say geopolitically on technology in general, China and the US are definitely trying to play. And you can see a lot of places that I won't name like Europe that you absolutely could say are not planned. And so you'll see how that plays out. You can see how it plays out with lots of technologies”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DEF CON kind of got a little out of control. I think it's a little too big. And then we did ShmooCon for 20 years. This is the last year, though. So that”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about the movie with Ben Still. Not the movie. This is an app before Foursquares, like the predecessor to Foursquare. And so you send a text to this One number and then it would go to all your friends. And so you'd send this text, and like, I'm at the bar. And immediately, like 100 friends would get the text. And they're like, I'll go to the bar. So we were like the drinking rate amongst hackers just went off the charts, but we were hanging out together all the time. And that was actually really cool community vibe for hackers. And we had some hackers that were good at getting people together. So that was a good era. I think it's hard to say where a center of gravity is. Hackers have conventions that they go to now.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's what we were doing. It was actually funny because in the same era, Dodgeball came out, which is like this pre iPhone location.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know now because, again, I'm sort of hacking other things, but we used to go to the chaos computer congress in Germany, which is like the big hacker convention. And we could blow their minds a little, but they could blow our minds a lot. And so that was cool. But what happened is... In the early 2000s, Microsoft started to get serious about computer security. And they started to import hackers to Seattle from everywhere. I was in Seattle at the time, again, graduating out of hacking and computer stuff and other things. But all my friends were hackers. And what was great is we had this critical mass of hackers from all over the world, including Germany and all these places that Microsoft imported. So that was a center of gravity for a while.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's two. That caused that. So, one is a center of gravity of technical excellence. And so you could say places like Hungary put out amazing mathematicians, which translates to pretty good understanding of computers. Some of those Eastern European places had that or still do. And so there's a center of gravity there. Germany had these extraordinary hackers that would blow our minds. We would go over there and just wonder why we were.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shady folks at governments around the world, and that's only people they'll sell to because otherwise they risk getting prosecuted in different jurisdictions. So they can get away with selling to a three-letter agency in the US, but you can't get away with selling it to even a corporation in the U.S. Because to use an exploit like that for corporate espionage, you're getting into very risky turf. American hackers don't want to play that game because they can make more money doing legit stuff. If you're a Romanian hacker, there's no six-figure job for you. So you might play with seeing how I can use that to get Bitcoin wallets or something. Love Romania, by the way.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think these days they'll hang out a shingle. I'm not going to name any here, but the point is you could hackers who are finding exploits know who they are. And so then you sell it to a broker. And those guys have relationships with...”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it means I send you a text message or something and I'm in and I control your phone. That is very hard to do. Apple's trying to keep that from happening. But if I have that, then I sell it to a broker. So there are certain hackers whose job is to vet these things.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT